NY judge says his own bias may have led to bad conviction

(CNN) — It was something former New York Supreme Court Judge Frank Barbaro just couldn’t get out of his mind: His 1999 second-degree murder conviction of a white man who said he killed a black man in self-defense.

On Thursday, 15 years after that conviction, a new judge is expected to announce her decision either to overturn the murder conviction or let Barbaro’s decision stand.

The case is being revisited because Barbaro, a white judge who had gained a reputation as a staunch supporter of civil rights, says his own racial bias may have led him to convict the suspect of murder.

“I couldn’t get out of my mind the look on the lawyer’s face when I said I found him guilty. And the defendant on the stand, like he was pleading to me, ‘It just happened, it just happened,’ and that was sort of haunting me,” Barbaro said earlier this year in an exclusive interview with CNN.